Free Once Around by Barbara Bretton

he'd said it. Why else would she have signed on for life? She would work his way through law school and once he was established, her dream of a family would come true.
    Sometimes she. ate her lunch standing up at the kitchen counter so she could look out the window and admire the way his black hair gleamed almost blue in the noon sun. She told herself she ate at the counter because it was faster and easier, but that wasn't the truth.
    She liked the way his hair looked in the sunlight.
    She felt a little guilty about it. Not enough to stop watching him from the kitchen window, but enough to make her remember how hard she'd been on men who enjoyed watching her. Maybe that was part of the lure: Rafe Garrick didn't give her so much as a second glance. She'd rarely met a man who didn't react to her physical appearance in some way, and it unsettled her. Even Robert, at the end, had paid tribute to her looks. "You're a beautiful woman, Molly," he'd said as he walked out the door. "You won't have any trouble finding someone else."
    Assuming the day would come when she actually wanted someone else.
     
     
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    Two weeks went by , and she'd heard from Spencer Mackenzie three times since their first meeting. He never had much of anything to tell her. For some reason that didn't seem to matter to either one of them. They fell into easy conversation as if they'd known each other for years. In some ways they did. They knew many of the same people, had vacationed at the same places as children. They spoke a certain shorthand that needed no explanation. She and Robert had talked like that, in half sentences and coded phrases. She hadn't realized how much she'd missed it. Spencer had achieved the life her own husband had been aiming toward. She knew that life. She'd been part of it. Robert's dreams had been her own, and his success would have ultimately made her dreams possible. She would have had the family she'd always wanted.
    Of course , she didn't say any of that to Spencer. She knew better. If you ever wanted to know what divided the elite from the just plain rich, it was how they handled emotion. That was where her parents always got it wrong. They never could manage to tamp down all of those unruly feelings that kept spilling over at the most inopportune moments.
    So she kept her emotions to herself. She still regretted crying in his office that first afternoon. He must be accustomed to it , working on as many divorce cases as he did, but she wished she could reach back and erase the tape and start over again.
    You cried in front of Rafe , too. Why doesn't that bother you?
    Rafe 's emotions were even less on display than Spencer's, and yet she hadn't felt the same degree of regret over her loss of composure. Embarrassment, yes, but not regret. They'd never had anything close to a real conversation. Want some iced tea? Yeah, leave it on the back step. Sure hot out today, isn't it? Yep, it sure is. They ate their sandwiches not fifty feet away from each other every single day of the week and they never once had lunch together. He sat outside under the maple tree while she sat inside at the secondhand card table he'd found for her but never shared.
    She wouldn 't have thought twice about asking Spencer to join her, even for pb&j. Everything with him was easy and natural, as if she'd been there, done that, many times before. Everything about him was comfortably familiar. She understood his sense of humor, the way he phrased his sentences, even the way he paused before he answered so he could frame his response to its best advantage. That was the lawyer in him, and she understood. Robert had been like that, too, the good Robert. The one she'd married.
    None of it made any sense , which only proved that she was still a long way from looking for serious male companionship. No matter what her body told her whenever Rafe Garrick was near.
     
     
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    Molly made a trip into Manhattan to touch base with her contacts at her old